If you were a prisoner hoping to get your hands on a mobile phone to help assist with a breakout, how would you go about it?

A prisoner – or prisoners – in a Brazilian jail thought better of the ol’ file-in-a-cake routine and instead had the novel idea of getting someone on the outside to tape a load of items to a cat in the hope that it would enter the jail unnoticed. It might not surprise you to learn that the plan failed.

Unfortunately for the prisoners, the cat was spotted as it made its way across the grounds of the jail, located in the city of Arapiraca, north-east Brazil.

“An agent saw the cat and went to look at it closely because something about it seemed wrong,” prison guard union head Marcelo Avelino told the O Globo newspaper.

When the prison guards nabbed the feline, they found it had a mobile phone taped to its body, together with a memory card, an earphone, two saws, drills and a number of batteries.

According to a Reuters report about the incident, the cat – which presumably looked like a toolkit on legs – was detained by police.

The authorities are now faced with the tricky task of trying to work out to whom the cat was supposed to be delivering the items. Commenting on the incident over the weekend, a spokesperson for the prison told local newspaper Estado de S.Paulo, “It’s tough to find out who’s responsible for the action as the cat doesn’t speak.” It’s not known if the line was delivered with a wry smile.

One idea might be to line up the prison’s 263 detainees and set the cat free in a twist on the traditional ID parade – it’s bound to head straight to its master. Presumably the mobile phone will also yield some clues.

As for the cat, no charges were brought and it’s now being cared for at an animal center.